For more than 80 years the world has wondered what happened to pilot Amelia Earhart, who disappeared over the South Pacific in 1937. The History Channel documentary "Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence" suggests an old photo holds the key to the mystery.

Houston County, TN ArchiveHistorical societies all over the country have old mystery photos of local citizens. The picture above is from the Houston County, Tenn., archives. Thank you to Archivist/Records Manager Melissa Barker for submitting this image. Melissa knows from the photographers imprint it was taken by Edward E...

Family milestones are well-known as photo occasions. Births, marriages and even deaths show up in family photo collections. There's another family photo op in your family history: The purchase of a photo album or a family record like the one below. c. 1886, Library of Congress Family records...

Real-photo postcards postcards among your collection of family letters and photos might contain a variety of clues worth exploring. From stamp boxes to postmarks and messages, there can be genealogical gold in the littlest things.

Don't you love a good story? I do. As genealogists we're trained to listen to the tales told at family gatherings and sort fiction from fact. Pictures not only come with their own set of stories, but they also can be used as proof of a genealogical event.&nbsp...

On this Photo Detective blog, 2016 was a year of early color (and colorized) photos, photo-ID tips and crowd-sourcing. If you missed the most-popular posts, don't worry. The links in this 2016 wrap-up will take you them. Photo Identification TipsNewspapersWe started the year off right with a big...

It's not the first time a family photo begs the question "What were they thinking?" That's the case with this image of family sitting as though they're doing a mannequin challenge. The story behind this clowning for the camera has been lost, and the picture lacks identification. It was...

Thank you Darlene Sampley! I met Darlene last month in San Diego at an all-day seminar for the San Diego Genealogical Society. We started talking about her family photo collection and I started thinking about Family History Month, which genealogists traditionally observe in October. Hmm. Wouldn't it be...

This photo takes your breath away. It's a gorgeous painted tintype. This woman in the blue dress stares into the camera with such intensity, you wonder what she was thinking. Tintypes, patented in 1856 in the United States, were available in other countries. This is a particularly nice...

The three parts to this German photo mystery are the caption, the date of the image and the family history information. The first blog post dated the image to the 1880s, and the second post discussed caption translation confusion. Please read the comments to the Caption Confusion post. A woman...

Most of us feel lucky to have one picture of an ancestor, but imagine finding three images of an identical person in family photos and not knowing who he is. Obviously this man was important to someone in Kyndahl Carlson's family. This triple mystery appears in a family photo album...